He kept his post for about eight months, and then one memorable morning he allowed Marshal Mac Mahon to dismiss him from it like a lacquey. The Spaniards, by way of expressing their disbelief in the consistency of courage at all times and in all circumstances, are accustomed to say that a man was brave “on a certain day.” One may assert then, without any imputation on M. Simon’s general valor, that on the 16th May, 1877, he showed an utter want of pluck. The reason for this appears to have been that he was out of health at the time—worn out by two or three sleepless nights, and disgusted with the worries of office. He had gone to bed on the 15th May without any suspicion that the Marshal President intended to dismiss him and his Liberal Cabinet, and he was therefore astounded when, as he was dressing, a messenger brought him a letter in which the Marshal cavalierly told him that, as he had been unable to manage the Republican majority, he must make way for stronger men. Now it was quite true that the Republicans under Gambetta had behaved very factiously towards Jules Simon. Parties were so divided in the Lower House that no Minister could govern, and it was manifest that the only way out of the death-lock would be through a dissolution. But M. Simon was cashiered at the instigation of a Royalist Palace Cabal, who wanted the next elections to be held under the auspices of a Reactionary Cabinet, and he should have had the boldness to denounce this intrigue. Instead of doing that he sat down in his dressing-gown, it is said, and wrote a tame, self-exculpatory letter to the Marshal. He did not see that Mac Mahon had played into his hands by enabling him to take his stand as champion of the entire Republican party. A few brave words of defiance to the Cabal, a dignified reproof to the Marshal himself, and an appeal to the whole nation to rouse itself for a grand battle at the polls, this is what Jules Simon’s letter should have contained, and an epistle couched in these terms would have made him immensely popular. But the ejected Premier’s abject, doleful apology appearing in the papers on the same day as the Marshal’s letter, spread consternation and disgust through the Republican party. It was a whine at the moment when a trumpet blast was expected. Simon had missed the opportunity of being great. The Republicans were ashamed of him, and spurned him with a positive yell of execration. In the course of the morning he hurried to M. Thiers’s house, and began in a lachrymose style to descant upon his wrongs, saying that he had never been the Marshal’s effective adviser, that the Duc de Broglie had all along been guiding Mac Mahon, &c. “Why on earth didn’t you say that in your letter?” screamed Thiers; and the lugubrious M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, lifting up his long arms in woe, repeated like his chief, “Why was not that said in the letter?”